KIRKUS REVIEW

Five years after his last case in far-off Montana (Light of
the World, 2013),
sometime sheriff’s detective Dave Robicheaux returns to Iberia Parish,
Louisiana, for another 15 rounds of high-fatality crime, alcohol-soaked
ruminations, and heaven-storming prose.

Jimmy Nightingale’s silver-tongued charm may destine him for the
Senate, but he’s certainly mixing with some dark powers along the way, most
notably his backer Fat Tony Nemo, who’s made his bones in politics, porn, and
drugs. As part owner of a financial company that’s issued a reverse mortgage on
the house owned by Dave’s old buddy Clete Purcel, Tony ends up with a fistful
of Clete’s markers, squeezes him hard, and isn’t impressed when Dave borrows
money of his own to retire the debt. Jimmy himself seems invincible until he’s
accused of rape by Rowena Broussard, the painter and photographer whose husband
is eccentric novelist Levon Broussard, whose Civil War fiction Tony would love
to film. When Jimmy indignantly protests his innocence, Dave points out,
“People do things when they’re drunk that they would never do sober.” And Dave
should know, because he himself is suspected of getting blasted and killing T. J.
Dartez, the truck driver who accidentally killed Molly, Dave’s third wife.
Listening to Clete talk about Kevin Penny, the abusive father who’s run off
after getting bailed out of jail, Dave little knows how deeply implicated Penny
will be in the two other cases he’s entangled in. Fans of Burke’s fiction who
recognize the familiar types he evokes so powerfully—the corrupt politician,
the plausible mobster, the attractive but damaged woman, the bully who preys on
the weak and helpless—eagerly await the arrival of another stock character, the
crazy hired killer who’ll purify the landscape as remorselessly as a flash fire,
and immediately recognize him in the person of Chester "Smiley"
Wimple, who takes it upon himself to kill everyone who needs killing and a few
who maybe don’t.

Despite a plot and a cast of characters formulaic by Burke’s
standards (though wholly original for anyone else), the intimations of
mortality that have hovered over this series for 30 years have never been
sharper or sadder.

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